Commercial and residential kitchens are tasked with properly preparing numerous types of food products such as chicken, other poultry, fish, meat, breads, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, and many other products. A common problem during food preparation is that food products are inconveniently sized. This problem has motivated the development of a large number of devices for cutting, chopping, grating, slicing, dicing, blending, pureeing, crushing, peeling and generally shaping food products into their desired dimensions. The range of available food preparation devices in cost, size, and complexity is a tribute to ingenuity.
Despite the numerous food preparation devices that have been developed, it does not imply that all food preparation problems have been solved. It is well known that there are a number of food products, particularly chicken and other poultry, which often have undesired dimensions for preparation. For example, available chicken cutlets are often too thick for an intended dish or serving. Cutting a thick chicken cutlet into thinner chicken cuts is not trivial. A sharp blade is required to slice the chicken, which makes such slicing dangerous. In addition, to accurately cut a thin cutlet from a thicker cutlet requires proper positioning and accurate control of both the knife and the cutlet. Compounding the problem is that chicken, other poultry and fish cutlets are usually moist and slippery and should be firmly held in a manner that enables accurate cutting.
In the prior art are devices suitable for slicing products such as chicken, other poultry, meats, and fish. Some are relatively large and expensive and are better suited to large scale slicing operations rather than point of preparation slicing. Others are general slicers that are far from optimized for cutting chicken, poultry, meats, and fish. Still others are rather complex, heavy, or large and thus unsuited for low cost, point of preparation slicing tasks. Such limits their usefulness for some applications.
In view of the foregoing, there remains a need for a flexible, easy to use food slicing apparatus for accurately slicing thicker cuts of food products such as chicken, other poultry, meats, and fish into thinner cuts. Beneficially, such an apparatus would be safe and easy to use. Preferably, such an apparatus would also be suitable for low cost implementations. Even more preferably, the food slicing apparatus would be able to accurately cut more than one cutlet thickness.